I ran across an issue with an app I had distributed with an enterprise distribution certificate. The problem is, after a year, the certificate expired.

What to do? Download the code again, recompile the app, make sure everything works with the latest iOS SDK, etc. I ran into multiple issues doing so as the application I needed to update the embedded provisioning profile where, because of changes in the iOS SDK, some of my code was simply not compatible anymore. It’s a legacy app and nobody wants to update that stuff, no time, no budget, etc.

Then, I came across this brilliant website that explained how to extract the app, inject a new mobile provisioning profile, resign the app and repackage everything. Here’s the code for it:

I don’t know if you ever ran into that kind of problem before, where you need to initialize a jagged array with Objective-C, but I did. I was disappointed to find out that Objective-C doesn’t have any easy way of recursively call a variadic method. I read several posts talking about using NSInvocation to achieve this, but as Apple stated, it’s not capable of doing so. Setting an argument on the NSInvocation object that is beyond the static arguments returned by the method signature will result in an out of bounds exception.

I found a way, it’s not super pretty, but it works just fine. Here’s a few examples of how simple this task is using other languages:

Here’s what I came up with for Objective-C. As you can tell, it’s quite convoluted. I’m sure there’s a better way of executing this, but at least, if you need something right away, that might answer *some* questions:

As you can see, this can get pretty convoluted. I had to create a method that reacts differently for all the children parameters, since the recursive call of a variadic method isn’t supported with Objective-C. You could simply call the createJaggedArrayFromArray method using an array of lengths instead of using the nil-terminated list of arguments, but sometimes, it makes it easier for porting code from one language to another, to make sure it works the same way.